Story Drafting

I have begun the drafting, and the eventual creation of my story. To begin, I have started with using some more initial brainstorms, leading to very useful ideas, and this has lead to a very short draft summary of a story, that I will write after the images.


Brainstorming:

In this brainstorm, I thought of a few simple ideas to get the draft plan going. I took into account things that were required by the brief, as well as things that I thought might work well in the narrative.

I then progressed to this diagram, which was where I began linking up each thought point of information I found desirable.

Here I jotted some basic ideas for what could be the theme of my story. i highlighted such things as the possibility of making the narrative in the style of a modern day fairy tale, or giving my narrative the theme of bullying, independence and how I could work my illustrations.

 Draft Ideas:

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This was my first ever draft of how a possible plot could go, using a very basic and simple paragraph. This was my main draft starting point, and also the point in which the main story development truly began, and was out of the initial brainstorming stage.

Here I go a bit more in depth about the usage of  using the line "once upon a time" and "happily ever after".  These terms are used a lot in fairy tale like literature, and tend to act as an opening, and a closing usually.

Expansion on my first draft, using bullet points. Bullet points are very handy as a form of breaking the plan down into bitesize chunks. (my first draft example can be found 2 images above)

Here, I yet again expand on my first, and second draft of the story planning. I am giving the story a bit more detail, and depth.

*As a summary of my initial first draft, I wrote this simple text in my book to start me off.

"Once upon a time, there was a hamster who was excluded, and then the secondary character helped the rodent. Lessons were learnt, and everything turned out ok."

This small piece of text may not seem like much, but this sentence for me, in my early developmental stages, helps lay a faint 'route' for the story to be expanded upon, at this stage I am not going to create a long draft, whilst having little direction, small steps will gradually build up to a fully fledged final.

Story Idea 1, (using draft summary from A5 pad):

Using this very brief line of text, I have produced a more detailed bullet point draft for the novel. This is more of a bare structure. I will detail the points below.

1) Once upon a time, there was a hamster named Kiwi.

2) He is a happy, and loving animal, who lives a carefree life in ...

3) He lacks many friends due to his height, he is never noticed by anyone else, thus excluded.

4) After being excluded from a number of activities, such as helping an animal look for a lost item, and being excluded from a sporting event that requires a taller statue, he ends up being teased by a group of antagonists, who bully him.

5) After they tease him, the protagonist feels even more excluded, and becomes upset.

6) He is encountered by a female wolf character, and she tries to find a solution to his problem.

7) Eventually, after going through multiple ideas, they find using stilts works.

8) He chases the bullies away, and is now the tallest in the land. He makes more friends, and becomes included, and he is happy again. The story ends on a happy note.



This is a rough idea, of how my story could go, however I am open to tweaking if I feel the need to.



Thomas.